The Morningstar solar house is one of the features at Penn State's Sustainability Experience Center, where the university is contemplating a permanent structure for classrooms, research labs, and offices that would be built to Living Building Challenge standards. Image: Patrick Mansell

Boston University's Goldman School of Dental Medicine will increase its clinical space by 60% through a renovation and addition that are being conducted while the school stays open and continues to offer its services to students and the community. Image: SmithGroupjjr

A rendering of the Innovation Complex in Providence, R.I., which broke ground last month. The 191,000-sf complex is the latest “knowledge community”—and the second in Providence—to be developed by Wexford Science + Technology. Image: Wexford

Gold Award: The University of Chicago’s new Residential Commons is part campus, part community....

The robotics labs at the 71,000-sf John J. Bowen Center for Science and Innovation, on the Providence, R.I., campus of Johnson & Wales University. This STEM building provides teaching labs and support spaces for engineering, biology, physics, chemistry, and organic chemistry. Photo courtesy John Horner.

USC Village, a six-building, 1.25-million-sf expansion of the University of Southern California's University Park campus, will be ready for occpancy this fall. The project took 12 years from conception to completion. Image: USC

Prefabrication of the six buildings’ walls reduced construction time by a year.

A rendering of the 42,500-sf, $29 million Innovation and Discovery Center at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa., which broke ground last October. Kinsley Construction is the GC on the project, designed by Ellenzweig. Last year, spending on education construction spending rose nationally by 6.5% to $88.9 billion. And a new survey of preK-12 school districts and colleges finds strong construction and renovation activities underway this year. The Ursinus project should be completed in time for the fall 2018 semester. Image: Ellenzweig